But that ending phrase seems very contrieved to me; it must be an ablativus qualitatis: "... and this rather silly appearance he had." Instead, I'm inclined to believe that specie is a typo for species; the meaning would then be "... and this was a rather silly sight" with "ea" agreeing with "species" by attraction.

Would you agree, or is the original wording defensible? I'm afraid of missing something obvious here.

Ah! Thank you; I'm very glad I asked: evidently I was too fixed on my initial interpretation. So, if I understand you correctly, you are proposing is that ea(que) is nominative singular feminine, agreeing with corona, and in turn that inepta is then nominative as well? If so, I would interpret specie (into perhaps less idiomatic English) as "with regards to appearance", but I guess the gist is the same.

Since I'm evidently not infallible (heh!), I might as well ask about another sentence:

"... she was now about two feet high and was going on shrinking rapidly: she soon found out that the cause of this was the fan she was holding..."

"... Mox repperit causae esse flabellum quod teneret..."

I can't parse that, being pretty confident that causae should be causam. Or?

Hm, interesting, but what is the grammatical structure here? Is that a partitive genitive? Wouldn't a closer translation then be "There is some(thing of) reason"? In that case this example is not parallel to "mox repperit causae esse flabellum", is it?